OSS Leftovers

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Open source in 2019, Part 2/3: The relative victory of open source
All the benefits detailed in part 1 really explain why open source became so popular in the last 15 years. Open source is everywhere today. It has become the default way to build and publish software. You can find open source on every server, you can find open source on every phone... Even Microsoft, the company which basically invented proprietary software, is heavily adopting open source today, with great success. By all accounts, open source won.
But... has it, really ?
The server, and by extension the computing, networking, and storage infrastructure, are unquestionably dominated by open source. But the growing share of code running operations for this infrastructure software is almost always kept private. The glue code used to provide users access to this infrastructure (what is commonly described as "cloud computing") is more often than not a trade secret. And if you look to the other side, the desktop (or the user-side applications in general) are still overwhelmingly driven by proprietary software.
Even contemplating what are generally considered open source success stories, winning can leave a bitter taste in the mouth. For example, looking at two key tech successes of the last 10 years, Amazon Web Services and Android, they both are heavily relying on open source software. They are arguably a part of this success of open source picture I just painted. But if you go back to part 1 and look at all the user benefits I listed, the users of AWS and Android don’t really enjoy them all. As an AWS user, you don't have transparency: you can’t really look under the hood and understand how AWS runs things, or why the service behaves the way it does. As an Android user, you can’t really engage with Android upstream, contribute to the creation of the software and make sure it serves your needs better tomorrow.
So open source won and is ubiquitous... however in most cases, users are denied some of the key benefits of open source. And looking at what is called "open source" today, one can find lots of twisted production models. By "twisted", I mean models where some open source benefits go missing, like the ability to efficiently engage in the community.
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Secure email provider Tutanota launches free encrypted calendar.
Our encrypted calendar - Tutanota Calendar - has just been added to your secure emails. This new feature brings amazing privacy improvements. With our encryption expertise, we have not only made sure that all data you enter is encrypted, we are also encrypting notifications for upcoming events. In contrast to other calendar services, we do not know when you have an appointment, where you have an appointment, or with whom you have an appointment. Basically, we remain completely blind to your daily habits.
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Women in code series: Joan Touzet
Joan Touzet is an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Member, Apache CouchDB PMC member and committer, with over 30 years of experience in commercial and open source software development. Based in Toronto, Canada, she currently works with Neighbourhoodie Software, running the CouchDB Development/Production Support team. In her spare time, Joan composes and records music, rides motorcycles, designs and builds electronic musical instruments, and pets cats. Gnomes over ponies.
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Kiwi TCMS: Contributor profile: Aneta Petkova
Aneta is a software engineer navigating the complex field of QA since her first "grownup" job. She's been working in the area of test automation for web applications using different programming languages and tools. Her mission is to inspire people to think about quality from the very inception of ideas and to blur the line between developers and QA specialists.
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digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
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today's howtos
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